Johnny Golding, The 9

th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
1
Abstract:
Classical metaphysics requires a concept of the ethical that belies or erases certain forms of truth-
telling, often pulling the ethical in the direction of more sterilized forms of reason and rationality in
order to invoke its universal applicability as a kind of one-size-fits-all for any person, place, time, or
thing. In so doing, not only does this tend to diminish or expunge the sensuous, carnal encounters of
body and spirit, it pre-figures certain forms of courage, care and imagination so that the very core of
what it means to make a community alive, responsive, and creative remains stuck in the old classical
canons of thought and practice. In this way, the beliefs and truths that tend to be reproduced serve
only to strengthen the status quos status somewhat of a problem if that status quos status is also
mired in misogynist, homophobic, ethnic and/or racially divisive traditions. The 9
th
Technology of
Otherness, building upon Foucaults Courage of Truth, the last lecture series before his untimely
death, seeks to show how an ethics drawn along the sensuous modalities (as Foucault positions them)
of courage (parrh!sia) and curiosity (z!t!sis), creates a certain form of community, a certain kind of
self, and with it, a certain kind of debt. It is precisely this debt that Socrates reminds Crito not to forget
to remember to pay to Asclepius, and to do so with the now quite infamous gift of the bird-cock.

Keywords: ethics, economy of debt; courage; parrh!sia; curiosity; z!t!sis; truth; queer difference;
magic garden; bird-cock.


The 9
th
Technology of Otherness:
A certain kind of debt

And the man who gave Socrates the poison now
and then looked at his feet and legs and after a
while he pressed his foot hard, and asked him if
he could feel; and he said, No; and then his leg,
and so upwards and upwards, and showed us
that he was cold and stiff. And Socrates felt them
himself, and said: When the poison reaches the
heart that will be the end. He was beginning to
grow cold about the groin, when he uncovered
his face, for he had covered himself up, and said
they were his last words he said: Crito, I
owe a cock ["#$# %&%'($] to Asclepius; will you
remember to pay the debt?
Plato, Phaedo.
1


1
Plato, Phaedo: The Last Hours of Socrates, translated by Benjamin Jowett, (The Project Gutenberg Ebook: 2008). Updated Jan
15, 2013 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1658/1658-h/1658-h.htm. Translations vary as to whether Socrates is purported to
have used I or we with respect to the owing of the cock to Asclepius. We will keep the Gutenberg translation but later in the
Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
2
Strange Debt
The question of debt, especially as the last words Socrates was purported to have whispered moments
before he succumbed to the hemlock, remains a vexed and oddly intractable one; perhaps even more so
when encountered amongst writings in a book on queer sensibilities. But it may not be as strange as it
might at first appear and, indeed, as we shall see after dispatching with two of the more well-known
interpretations, it may at least begin to provide an initial glimpse into a heterogeneic post-
postmodern ethics, one fuelled by a particular kind of debt, generated by a certain curiosity (z!t!sis),
and propelled by a queer, strange, sexual-carnal /ethical-political-aesthetic truth (parrh!sia).
2
It is a
blood-debt poetics, this oddly lubricated economy, with ethical difference at its core, courage as its
trope and a communal care of the self as its technology what we will name as the 9
th
technology of
otherness.

Before developing that intricate claim, let us turn briefly to Nietzsche and then to Derrida.

In one of the most famous interpretations of Socrates dying words, Nietzsche concludes, along with
many others, that because Asclepius was the God of Healing and because the very last words on the
mind of Socrates was to ask Crito not to forget to pay off, as Nietzsche would phrase it, a ridiculous
debt to this (and no other) god, Socrates seemed to have undergone a deathbed conversion one born
out of a fear of dying, belying, thought Nietzsche, a grave and deeply secretive pessimism. For
Nietzsche, this was the complete reversal of all Socrates stood for during the whole of his life.

This ridiculous and terrible last word means for those who have ears: O Crito, life is a
disease. Is it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully and like a soldier in the
sight of everyone, should have been a pessimist? He had merely kept a cheerful mien whilst
concealing all his life long his ultimate judgment, his inmost feeling. Socrates, Socrates
suffered life! And then he still revenged himself with this veiled, gruesome, pious, and

argument will draw upon Foucaults use of we to develop a more general point about the care of the self especially in relation
to the true.

2
A point to which we will return momentarily, but see: Michel Foucault, 15 February, The First Hour, in his The Courage of
Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the Collge de France 1983-1984, translated by Graham Burchell,
(New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), pp. 86-89. Note: the Socratic form of parrh!sia (!thos) carefully sidesteps the carnal-
knowledge practice of body, sex, sweat but as we will see, this is not just an interesting aspect of queer parrh!sia, it is its
verification.

Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
3
blasphemous saying. Did a Socrates need such revenge? Did his overrich virtue lack an ounce
of magnanimity? -- Alas, my friends, we must overcome even the Greeks!
3


On a rather different note, Derridas interpretation(s) announce a multiple doubling of an
inheritance/debt, an inscription of a last will and testament by a dying man (Socrates) whose words are
recorded by someone (Plato) who, despite not even being present at the moment of utterance
apparently he was sick on the day must nevertheless suppose a memory (or, in any case, a not
forgetting) of an event which may or may not have taken place, by someone whose authority he
wishes to break but, by writing those last words, instead immortalizes that very authority. Plato, caught
as both receiver & sender, is now also con-joined to Socrates from behind by virtue of the
reciprocating journeying inheritance of inscription.
4
Here the end-game becomes a double entendre
mid-game and in so doing, entirely changes the rules of the game. As Derrida so vividly (and oddly
homo-cidally) enframes it: Socrates could be said to be eternally fucked by a Plato who may or may
not be aware of what he is doing and indeed must do. Plato: the devoted pupil-inheritor on the one
hand, the knowledge-transfer disseminator on the other; receiver and sender, Plato enacts the double-
bind which looks a lot like an innocent placebo but generates the pleasure/pain sadomasochism of the
pharmakon. And all the while, the debt-cock just keeps on growing.

Over to Derrida:


3
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dying Socrates, in his The Gay Science (with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs),
translated with commentary by W. Kaufman, (New York: Vintage, 1974), section 340, p. 272. The earlier part of the aphorism
gives the full sense of his disappointment: I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said and did not
say. This mocking and enamored monster and pied piper of Athens, who made the most overweening youths tremble and sob,
was not only the wisest chatterer of all time: he was equally great in silence. I wish he had remained taciturn also at the last
moment of his life; in that case he might belong to a still higher order of spirits. Whether it was death or the poison or piety or
malicesomething loosened his tongue at that moment and he said; O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster. This ridiculous and
terrible last word means for those who have ears: O Crito, life is a disease.

4
See for example 4 September 1977 where Derrida explains: When Being is thought on the basis of the gift of the es gibt (sorry
for the simplifying stenography, this is only a letter), the gift itself is not something; it would be, hmmm, like an envoi,
destination, the destinality, sorry, of an envoi, which of course does not send this or that, which sends nothing that is, nothing that
is a being, a present. [] in Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass,
(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 61. But for the multiplicity/doubling of inscription and its circulation
see also Of Grammatology, translated by G. Spivak, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974/1997), especially
Part I Writing Before the Letter, pp. 3-94; The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (London/Chicago: Univ of Chicago
Press, 1996), especially Chapters 2 and 3 (Beyond: Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death, and Whom
to Give to (Knowing Not to Know), pp. 35-52 and 53-81, respectively. Also see The Politics of Friendship, translated by George
Collins, (London: Verso, 2005), especially Chapter 4, The Phantom Friend Returning (in the name of Democracy), pp. 75-112.
Last but not least, his seminal Dissemination (New York: Continuum, 1981), especially regarding the pharmakon developed in
Platos Pharmacy, pp. 67-122; and The Double Session, pp. 187ff.

Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
4
5 June 1977. [] I have not yet recovered from this revelatory catastrophe. Plato behind
Socrates. Behind he has always been, as it is thought, but not like that. Me, I always knew it,
and they did too, those two I mean. What a couple. Socrates turns his back to Plato who has
made him write what he wanted while pretending to receive it from him. [] And since Plato
writes, without writing, without wanting that a trace be preserved, since he writes, without
writing, that Socrates, who passes for someone who has never written, in truth will have
written, whether this is known (or not) and will have written just that which he will have
written (but who, he?), you can try to forward the inheritance

5 September 1977. [] P.S. I have again overloaded them with colors, look, I made up our
couple, do you like it? Doubtless you will not be able to decipher the tattoo on platos
prosthesis, the wooden third leg, the phantom-member that he is warming up under Socrates
ass.
5


Of course there are other interpretations to the last words of Socrates, though most of which, over the
past two millennium+ of discussion thus far, tend to fall under the two broad headings as singled out
above. That is, of a less than benign, suspicious or secretive final thought confession or deathbed
conversion; or, as expressing however enigmatically, a pharmakon-esque inscription of Being, woven
into the very fabric of time, circulation, inheritance and debt, and therewith crucial to the (quasi-)
transcendental movement of a trace, any trace be it identity, sexuality, democracy, or indeed, life
itself.

Changing the value of currency (a certain kind of courage)

Foucault proposes a wholly distinct approach from the broad outlines sketched above. It is one that, as
we will see, not only introduces a methodological game-changer, but opens onto a completely different
environ, quite distinct from the one encountered by Adam & Eve and their deeply troubled progeny.


5
The Postcard, pp. 12 and 65, respectively. Italicization in the original.

Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
5
In the immediate months preceding his death in1984, Foucault delivered a series of 18 lectures at the
Collge de France, published posthumously (in French, 2008 and in English, 2011) as The Courage of
Truth: The Government of Self and Others, II.
6
These lectures were a continuation of the previous two
years lectures (from 1982 and 1983) and were situated around four practice-knowledge hubs or
modalities of truth: (1) the modality of prophecy/ religiosity; (2) the modality of the order of things;
that is, of being (phusis); (3) the modality of demonstrative technique or tekhn! in the narrow sense of
expertise and finally, (4) the modality that polemicized the human condition (!thos).
7
It was to this
last economy of truth, itself a particular knowledge-practice form of parrh!sia, that Foucault begins to
tease out what is at stake in the elliptical demand of Socrates to Crito: that Crito must remember not to
forget to repay the debt owed to Asclepius in the manner of gifting the cock.
8
As we shall see shortly,
it is from the certain kind of debt this fourth modality exposes, reiterates and promotes that the 9
th

technology of otherness is created and sustained.

Invoking the motto of Diogenes to re-situate the entire polemic of debt and the multitude
interpretations of its meaning via Socrates, Crito, Asclepius and the cock, Foucault steps away from the
iterative fact of exchange, circulation and debt lets just call it the market community and, instead
demands, as did Diogenes, that if you (read: we) cannot alter the fact of exchange itself, then at least, to
quote Diogenes, change the value of the currency ["##$%&' ()* +%,+ (-. *-,/+(-0].
9
The currency
in question could be said to be the general economy of truth; its value: the polemical condition of being
human (!thos). Its parrh!sia, Foucault argues, is a truth forged from the complex and yet completely
obvious mix of curiosity, sensate, invention, experimentation, practice, bodily knowledge, power,
movement and risk. It is this truth that could (and did) change the currency; it is this truth that could
(and did) emit a different kind of ethics; it is this truth that could (and did) draw a certain kind of debt;
it is this truth that could (and did) shift the terrain of aesthetics from the Beautiful and Sublime to that

6
Op. cite. The Courage of Truth.

7
See the whole of 1 February 1984: First Hour and 1 February 1984: Second Hour, The Courage of Truth, but particularly
pp. 15-19 and pp. 25-27, respectively.

8
The general outlines of the concept parrh!sia are developed throughout the series of lectures on The Courage of Truth, but for
this point see in particular, Lecture One: 1 February 1984: First Hour, pp. 1-22, and especially 10ff, as well as the afterword
The Course Context, The Courage of Truth, pp. 343-358.

9
7 March 1984, The Second Hour, in The Courage of Truth, pp. 226-228.

Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
6
of an unquantifiable strange/estranged ethos. And it is this truth that required and still requires
courage, because it is this truth that could rock (and did rock and still does rock) the status quo.

We can say then, very schematically, that the parrhesiast is not the prophet who speaks the
truth when she reveals fate enigmatically in the name of someone else. The parrhesiast is not a
sage who, when she wants to and, against the background of her silence, tells of being and
nature (phusis) in the name of wisdom. The parrheisast is not the professor or teacher, the
expert who speaks of tekhn! in the name of a tradition. So she does not speak of fate, being or
tekhn!. Rather, inasmuch as she takes the risk of provoking war with others [] the
parrhesiast brings into play the true discourse of what the Greeks called !thos.
10


For parrh!sia to exist in the sense Foucault is developing means first that there must be some kind of
bond between the statements sender and the receiver. Second, there must be some kind of risk to the
exposing of truth on the part of the speaking subject, ranging from the breaking up of a relationship to
the violent retaliation of the State. Hence, the parrhesiast and the ethos to tell it as it is requires a
certain kind of courage and risk. It is the courage to speak out, to provoke, to incite into action without
taking oneself out of the relationship; to invent anew by supposing it could be otherwise and then
figuring out what and how this otherwise might become real, alive, take root and flourish, without
preventing the telling it as it is from being heard even if it might wound or destroy the messenger.
Not shock for shocks sake; not offence just because it could be done; not a sterile rationality backing
any decision; but rather, a certain kind of connection, a certain kind of care and attention to detail; a
certain kind of courage, curiosity, stylistics of existence, generosity, intellect, humour call it what you
will a complex/heterogeneic logic of sense to make it known; to make it happen, to make manifest
a certain kind of practice-knowledge of that which may not fit in exactly or precisely (or even at
all), but in spite of that (or even because of it), may put ones body and soul at risk to make that
polemical condition of life itself accessible, hearable, readable, graspable, right here, right now.
11


10
1 February 1984, The Second Hour, The Courage of Truth, p. 25. The word she has been used instead of the traditional
translation of he when the genitalia really should not matter to the argument; and, not to put too fine a point on it, in order to
provoke a war with others. (JG).

11
See 1 February 1984: The First Hour, in The Courage of Truth, p. 11, where Foucault details it this way: The parrhesiast
gives his opinion, he says what he thinks, he personally signs, as it were, the truth he states, he binds himself to this truth, and he
is consequently bound to it and by it. But this is not enough. For after all, a teacher, a grammarian or a geometer, may say
something true about the grammar or geometry they teach, a truth which they believe, which they think. And yet we will not call
this parrh!sia. We will not say that the geometer and grammarian are parrhesiasts when they teach truths which they believe. For
Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
7

The Queering of Difference

Now this parrh!sia, this ethical commitment to tell it as it is was not, and could not, be made in
isolation. In the example cited above, clearly the courage to speak was immersed in / born of a
profound commitment, connectedness, a friendship of the self to (another/an-other) self. It required a
courage buoyed or infused with the political, aesthetic, possibly dirty and unimaginable right to know
(thyself) in relation to this self-other. In so knowing, telling, making, doing, a radical, slightly more
subtle heterogeneic form of the ethical was now being advanced by Foucault, one where the veridiction
of the parrhesiastic ethos, would be (and must be) maintained as an always-already plurality of self-
to-self collective connectedness.

This heterogeneic plurality of self exposed yet another set of multiplicities. For parrh!sia of the
fourth modality encounter, requires in the founding/finding of this ethical multiplicity this economy
of living a recognition on both sides of the self-to-self relation that a particular governance or care
must take place. This governance not only concerned the quality of life itself: that in order for the
(heterogeneic/pluralised) self to survive and, indeed, thrive, a radical governance or care of the self,
brought to bear by telling it as it is, must always remain critically embedded into ones relational
being in the world. But it also meant that this embeddeness, this ethical currency must somehow be
repeated; must somehow be circulated time after time. And as it was premised on, indeed required a
public other neither priest, nor teacher nor technician, nor police but rather the parrahesiac
other, to tend to and to nourish, this generative and pluralised self-to-self care, it was this
recognition and insistence of this kind of care of self, that forms the context to Socrates elliptical
remark not to forget what most people tended to forget or did not even know it should be
remembered: the pluralised ethical demand to care for the pluralised self. No longer political
bravery, writes Foucault, but the introducing [of] a certain form of truth into a knowledge that

there to be parrh!sia, you recall I stressed this last year the subject must be taking some kind of risk [in speaking] this truth
which he signs as his opinion, his thought, his belief, a risk which concerns his relation with the person to whom he is speaking.
For there to be parrh!sia in speaking the truth one must open up, establish and confront the risk of offending the other person, of
irritating him, of making him angry and provoking him to conduct which may even be extremely violent. [] In short, the act of
truth, requires: first, the manifestation of a fundamental bond between the truth spoken and the thought of the person who spoke
it; second, a challenge to the bond between to interlocutors Hence this new feature of parrh!sia: it involves some form of
courage.

Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
8
men do not know they know, a form of truth which will lead them to take care of themselves. Thus, he
continues:

I tried to show you how, in his Apology, Socrates defined his parrh!sia, his courageous truth-
telling, as a truth-telling whose final objective and constant concern was to teach men to take
care of themselves. Socrates took care of men, but not in the political form: he wants to take
care of them so that they will learn to take care of themselves.
12


Returning, then to the curious debt owed to Asclepius, to be paid in terms of the bird-cock. As is well
known, a debt of this nature is charged when and only when a specific body is known to be gravely ill,
then healed (by Asclepius) and the resultant thank you is manifested precisely as cited above. But in
the last moments of Socrates life, there is no (apparent) diseased body; and thus there is no (apparent)
healing; so why the payback, why the insistence to remember not to forget and why link it to courage,
the courage to tell the truth (parrh!sia)? It is because Socrates, as a living parrhesiast becomes in
death, both parrhesiast and payback, the embodied ana-materiality of a polemicized ethics.

To put this slightly differently, it is because, this certain kind of truth is nothing more nor less than
the Socratic prick that both lances the boil of a forgetting/concealing (with minor apologies to
Heidegger), whilst simultaneously goading into action a pluralized care of the self, and with it, a
profoundly heterogeneic economy of being, what could be called a magic garden which must be
tended to, cultivated, over and again. For magic gardens do not happen on their own; they require a
profound willingness (courage) to engage in the dangerous game of telling it as it is, and
remembering not to forget to pay the debt in the currency of a multi-dimensional, multi-relational 9
th

technology of otherness.





Bio:

12
15 February 1984: The Second Hour, in The Courage of Truth, pp. 110.
Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
9
Johnny Golding is a contemporary philosopher and artist. Her research covers the curious intersections
of fine art, digital, media and electronic arts as thought through (i) ana-materialism and the new
materialisms of space/ speed/ curved-time and dimensionality (ii) dirty theory and the erotic logics of
sense (iii) the Enlightenment filtered thorough feminism, queer studies and the wild sciences. She is
the Director of CFAR and holds the Chair as Research Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art at the
School of Art-BIAD (Margaret St). Her recent publications include: Ana-Materialism and the Pineal
Eye; Fractal Philosophy and The Small Matter of Learning how to Listen (or Attunement as the Task of
Art); Conversion on the Road to Damascus: Minority Report on Art; The University Must be Defended;
and Assassination of Time (or the birth of zeta-physics). Executive Editor of z!t!sis: a peer-reviewed
journal for contemporary art, philosophy & the wild sciences (ARTicle Press), it foregrounds research
driven by curiosity, experiment, and risk.



Johnny Golding, The 9
th
Technology of Otherness: a certain kind of debt, in Henry Rogers (Ed). Queer Textualities.
London/Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013). Not to be quoted without authors permission
10
Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass.
Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987
_____________. Of Grammatology. Translated by G. Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974/1997.

Foucault, Michel. The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the
Collge de France 1983-1984. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan,
2011.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science (with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs).
Translated with commentary by W. Kaufman,. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Plato. Phaedo: The Last Hours of Socrates. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Project Gutenberg
Ebook: 2008. Updated Jan 15, 2013 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1658/1658-h/1658-h.htm.



Words: 3,803.